…where technology meets learning

Dipity

It was Dapper that was great. And now I have seen Twitter Earth and Dipity – two extremely intersting “mashups” that essentially give you a visual story of your activities. To give you a flavour, I just had to link Dipity with this blog to get a visual timeline! You could even get a spatial map of where you performed an activity. From a learner tracking perspective, such tools could be an important component of being able to track learner activity in a given learning context. The instructor or guide could not only measure the level of the learner activity but also traceback to time taken to complete a particular activity (maybe even follow a learner’s chain of thought?).

2 Responses

I have bookmarked several sites that generate timelines – not mashups like Dipity, but timelines for generating biographical histories. Almost invariably, the timelines they generate are horizontal.

My experience has been than people generally don’t like to scroll horizontally on a computer screen, so what’s up?

These timelines make me think about a book I read a long time ago, called “About Face” by Alan Cooper. Cooper defines the term “mechanical age modeling” as “importing linguistic or mental images from the pre-digital world” into the digital one. Cooper argues that we often miss the power of the digital, or “information age models,” because we get hung up on the old way.

We’re all used to seeing timelines horizontally in books so naturally web designers want to replicate that on a computer screen, but maybe they deny users the ease of vertical scrolling and maybe even new ways of thinking about time and relationship of events?

Stephanie, the greatest innovations, in my opinion, arise when an existing paradigm is questioned. And ever so often, there is the greatest resistance to these questions. In religion, science, arts…anywhere we look, we have examples of so-called heretical behaviours, some of which result in rather unusually innovative or path breaking advancements.

Your question is great. It demonstrates an urge not to “get hung up” on old ways or not to apply new ways forcibly on great old ways of doing things.

Unfortunately, whether it is learning theory or technology, that is exactly what most people end up doing.